The rape-trick and the casteed gaze: intermedial feminist critiques of South Asian cinema in Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me

This article examines Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) as an intermedial critique of gendered violence in South Asian cinema. Reading the memoir as a spectator’s manifesto, it explores cinema’s pedagogy of fear, Roy’s critique of Bandit Queen (1994) as a ‘rape-trick,’ and the mediatization of political violence. Drawing on feminist film theory, postcolonial spectatorship, and the concept of the casteed gaze, the article argues that Roy exposes the ethical failures of cinematic spectatorship and calls for representational practices grounded in consent, agency, and accountability.